Easter Sunday, April 5, 2015

I must confess that during the midst of the penitential season of Lent, I took a four day vacation and went with my sister Anne to visit my brother John and my sister Jean and their spouses in the luxurious sunshine of Florida in Jupiter and Stuart. Indeed, this was a rich experience of Easter joy for me. My sister Jean and I would go down to the ocean beach before sunrise with a cup of coffee and also Morning Prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours. To experience the sun coming out of the ocean at sunrise alongside my sister Jean was an experience of Easter Joy.

Now while my sister Jean is younger than myself, neither one of us are teenagers, don’t you know. A deep part of the experience of Easter joy was that over the years we have experienced together both joy and sorrow, birth and death, athletic feats but also painful illnesses. As the sun came out of the ocean, we prayed Morning Prayer together entrusting that day into the hands of our loving God and asking for the grace to be the witnesses to His love.

What I was grateful for was that prayer was not a foreign language to the way we share our love with each other. In fact, our prayer was our expression of Easter faith and Easter joy. My sisters and brother make very real to me the presence of the Risen Lord in the here and the now.

Now that was awesome but it was only for four days, and then Anne and I returned to the brutal elements of winter, and I immediately immersed myself in our wonderful parish ministry of the Lenten season embracing spiritual disciplines.

A message for me and hopefully for all of us is that Easter joy is experienced in many, many life experiences. Easter is about Jesus. Easter is about real life. Easter is about how we experience the risen Jesus in our lives. The real Easter mystery is when experience the presence of the Risen Lord in the beauty of a sunrise, in simple sharing with people you love, in the ways you wash the feet of God’s poor, in this mystery of the Eucharist as are fed and nourished at the Table of the Lord.

One of the advantages of getting older is cataract surgery. Now I have been wearing glasses all of my life – feeling a bit jealous at times of people with 20-20 vision. Now with the miracle of cataract surgery, I no longer need glasses to drive my car or to celebrate the Eucharist. It is a sightedness that I have never previously experienced. The Easter grace we pray for is to have spiritual cataract surgery that enables to recognizes the presence of the Risen Lord in our lives in the here and the now.

Now I must warn you as was true of the first disciples they first encountered the empty tomb before experiencing the Risen Lord. The Easter Gospel speaks of the empty tomb experience of Mary, Peter, and John. They only gradually came to an Easter faith.

An important truth of our lives is that we discover important things about ourselves at the tomb. Just as the first disciples experienced the empty tomb before they came to a resurrection faith, we too need to empty ourselves at our own graves, leave behind our own burial cloths, and live in the light of the Risen Christ.

Our empty tomb experiences are the moments of darkness and confusion in life. As we peer into the empty tombs of the ups and downs of our everyday lives, we are challenged to see and believe as the apostle John did as he stared into the empty tomb.

Be in touch with the empty tomb experience when our worship is isolated from the rest of our lives. Does what happens at Mass on Sunday morning effect the way we live our life from day to day. At the dismissal of the Liturgy, we proclaim:”Go in peace glorifying the Lord by the way we live our life.” We receive the Eucharist at Mass so that we can witness of the love of Jesus by the way we live our lives. The Easter grace we seek to make more connections between the presence of Jesus that we receive in the Eucharistic body and blood of the Lord and the Jesus we experience in our love and service of one another.
It is the experience of an empty tomb we do not recognize the presence of Jesus in our lives. Christ is present to us 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The question is do we recognize the presence of Jesus, the spiritual dimension of the beauty of the sunrise and in the simple sharing with one you love. We seek the grace of a spiritual cataract surgery that sharpens our spiritual sightedness in being of God’s presence in the stuff of our life.

It is an empty tomb experience when Gospel values cannot be recognized in the way we live our lives. Plain and simple, we need to walk our talk as the followers of Jesus. Yes, self-centeredness, greed, lust, power and control, fears, anxieties are demons most of us are familiar with but we need to trust and embrace the grace Jesus offers. The risen Jesus calls us by name and offers us the grace to walk away from the empty tombs of the fears and the demons of our lives so that we live with Easter joy and an Easter peace.

Yes, it’s at the tomb that we can make sense of the questions that have followed us on our Lenten journey. The life issue we all face at at the empty tomb is that without trusting in the grace of God, we will never move away the empty tombs of our life that can too easily enslave us. A basic issue for us is whether we intend to live life newly now or just go on doing more the same-old, same-old and call it “following Jesus.” Lent has confronted us with the proposition that we are called beyond spiritual disciplines to a spiritual life. Will we ourselves, touched by Jesus, now rise and live life differently?

What does it mean for us to allow ourselves to be touched by the person of Jesus? What will it take for us to be convicted of the Easter message that Jesus seeks to fill with this world with His love? What will it take for us to believe that God’s love will triumph over poverty, conflict, violence and war?

We cannot celebrate Easter in one day; we cannot come to faith on one mass. Together, as a community of faith, a God’s Easter people, we make the journey together over the course of a lifetime.